Getting Your Facebook Vanity URL? Shrug. It’s Second-Rate Branding

You’re all excited about getting your vanity Facebook URL at the stroke of midnight (PT). You’ll finally be facebook.com/mememe! But the truth is, you’re not only too good to participate in an uncivilized landgrab for your own identity, you absolutely must do better to be a player in the digital world.

Chances are you won’t even get the Facebook name you really want — clearly everyone won’t. A bunch have already been reserved for a select few, like those friends-and-family shares of that IPO you’ll have to buy into when it goes public and never recoup a dime, while the insiders make out like bandits with penny shares (clearly I am suspended in a pre-dot-com bust fantasy world).

Michael Arrington got one of those insider offers, and joked that he wouldn’t be able to get “www.facebook.com/mike.” But suppose he wanted “Michael” or his name was “John Smith?” (Turns out he was offered /mikearrington, but wants /michaelarrington and is rolling the dice like most of the rest of us).

No, I am not jealous, and here’s why: the mistake you made was not, a long time ago, grabbing the domain name that best represented you. You still probably can find something that works. Do that, stick with it and brand yourself on any social media site you want forever. I grabbed “johnabell.com” a long, long time ago and have used it to direct e-mail to a number of accounts over the years. It also directs to a personal blog that has weeds growing in it.

But with that domain you can create an infinite number of subdomains — you know, the thing that makes it “politics.msnbc.com.”

Think about it: wouldn’t you rather give out “facebook.johnabell.com” (which I have been able to for ages) than whatever you end up getting from the indifferent server that doesn’t care that you are Michael Jackson – the beer expert and should be first in line, and not the former so-called Kind of Pop of the same name?

And, more to the point, wouldn’t it be something if anyone could find you intuitively without having to know what your name is at each and every place you might be? At the end of the day, you won’t know where to find someone on Facebook even with your fancy name until and unless they tell you. In a world where you have sub-domains on an omnipresent brand, people can figure it out.

You get the idea. Sure, it’s nice not to be a number, like http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=660483803. But queuing up for your own name is not cool — and imagine if they had tried to charge for the privilege. I will try for the Facebook name of my choice, of course — why not? I’ve done the same for a bunch of sites, half of which I have forgotten and never use.

But, if I don’t get it I don’t really care. No matter what site you might want to link up, you’ll always know how to find me: *.johnabell.comSee Also: